ACLU of Pennsylvania Issues Correction to its Report on Marijuana Arrests

ACLU of Pennsylvania Issues Correction to its Report on Marijuana Arrests

November 03, 2017

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PHILADELPHIA – The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania announced today that the organization has issued a correction to its recently released report on marijuana arrests in the commonwealth, entitled Cannabis Crackdown, which examined data from the Uniform Crime Reporting System over a period of seven years from 2010 to 2016.

The following statement can be attributed to the ACLU of Pennsylvania:

“We have recently learned our report, Cannabis Crackdown, contains a faulty calculation in the statewide racial disparity in arrests of adults for marijuana possession. We have recalculated the data and found that Black adults were 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white adults in 2016. In the 66 counties outside of Philadelphia – the commonwealth’s largest county where a municipal civil offense has been enforced in lieu of criminal arrest since October 2014 – the racial disparity is 6.1 times greater for Black adults. Our report erroneously stated that Black adults were 8.2 times more likely than their white counterparts to be arrested.

“We deeply regret the mistake. We have pulled the report and have hired an outside expert to conduct a full review of the data and will issue an update when our review is complete.”

Updated spreadsheets with the figures that were used in the calculations are available at aclupa.org/crackdown.